Yahoo search trends in 2013: Less voting, more twerking

Yahoo has released its list of most popular search terms for the past year, and there’s no need to panic: Professional famous-person Kim Kardashian is still among the top ten, as she has been for each of the last five years.

Miley Cyrus, however, ranked first on the list for 2013, returning to the top ten for the first time since she hit the No. 3 position in 2010. (The number one searched term in 2012 was “election,” according to Yahoo’s Vera Chan. This year, apparently, Yahoo users are more interested in twerking than voting.)

It’s really not clear what these lists mean. Internet search companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft crank them out every year, promoting the results as indicators of what’s hot in social trends and pop culture. Microsoft released its report on search trends for Bing this week; Google usually waits until later in December. They’re usually good PR material for the search companies themselves: The lists are always popular fodder for tech blogs and end-of-year round-ups.

Yahoo’s results are presumably drawn from a smaller segment of Internet users than the other search services. The Sunnyvale company only accounted for 11 percent of U.S.-based Internet searches in October, according to comScore, while Bing had 18 percent and Google had the lion’s share with almost 67 percent.